How To Be Listed Within Search Engines
Search Engine Directory Listings
Getting your website listed on search engine directories including Live, Yahoo and Google is important, it all depends on how you plan to market your website. Regular submission to search engines is not as important a factor in your search engine campaign as many might think. As long as you've got incoming links to your site (the more links - and better quality - the better) search engines will pick up your site. But, to make sure, submit your website to the major search engines after its launch. You can do this free of charge by clicking on the links below:
Submit your website to major search engines here >>
Submit your website to MSN Live Search here >>
Search engine submissions - Paid Inclusion
There are a number of pay-for-inclusion search engines which should guarantee the search engine will list your site - but not at what position.
Pay-per-click search engine campaign
A pay-per-click campaign is the fastest method to get your site listed on search engines. By effective keyword research and click cost analysis, pay-per-click search engines are a highly effective way to attract targeted traffic to your website. The best and most popular pay-per-click search engines our clients use are Yahoo Search Marketing and Google Adwords.
About Search Engines
Just a few years ago getting a high ranking in the search engines was easy. As search engines have evolved, it has become impossible to get a high ranking in the search engines with gimmicks or tricks. Now the only way is to have one of the best pages about your topic and lots of people agreeing that it is one of the best by linking to it. Before explaining how to get high rankings in the search engines it is important to understand some basics about search engines.
If you were to run a search engine what would be your number one goal? This one is simple; you would want to be the most used search engine on the Internet. The only way to become the most used search engine is accuracy. People use a search engine for one reason and that is to find what they are looking for. When people first started using the Internet in the early 1990's, it was difficult to find anything in a search engine. The reason Google became number one was that for several years they had the most accurate results. So if you want to get a high ranking in a search engine for the terms your pages are about, then you must give the search engine what it is looking for.
Search engines became more accurate because now they look primarily at one thing. That one thing is content. The only way for a search engine to find out what a page is about is to scan the page and see what it is about. Yes, there are a few other things the search engine looks at but none of those things matter if the content does not match what people are typing in a search engine. If you want to rank high in the search engines, you must make a great page specifically about the topic that page is about.
Natural language
It also matters how you put your content on the page. One of the things search engines look at now is natural language. You cannot just put a search term a bunch of times on the page. It is true than once upon a time that worked. But stacking search terms no longer works. Search engines look at how many times a term shows up in a sentence and how many times it shows up in a paragraph. In a normal paragraph you will not have a search term that shows up 6 to 10 times. That is not the way a paragraph is normally constructed. When a search engine sees this it counts against you and not for you. The same is true about sentences. So be careful how you word your content. Try not to put the same term multiple times in a sentence or several times in a paragraph.
It is also a good idea to make sure you write in complete sentences and make your content read well. This is not just a good idea for search engine consideration but also for the reader of your page. You want the viewer to find the page informative and easy to read. Having them come back and telling their friends about the page is important. If they find it interesting enough, they may just give you that all-important link to your page.
Here are some other things to consider about content: The content of your page is not just limited to the words written on the page. Search engines also look at how you present your content and what you say about it. For example, every page in your site should have a title. This is the first thing written on the page such as the title to an article. When you present a title you place it as a heading. Heading tags are a way to tell the search engines this is what my page is about. To be effective your heading needs to be about the same thing as the rest of the content of your page. You can also put sub headings on the page. You can title different sections of the page with heading 2 or heading 3 tags.
Search engines also give you two places to tell them what you think your content is about. This is done through your meta title and description tags. These are the only two meta tags that most search engines look at so far as determining how they are going to rank your page. The meta title is the place where you tell the search engine what your page is about. It can be exactly the same as the title on the page itself (your H 1 tag or page heading). Your description tag gives you the opportunity to describe the content of the page to the search engine. The description needs to be short and to the point. It should be no more than two sentences but preferably only one sentence. There is no reason a good description of a page cannot be made in one simple but complete sentence.
Search engines and content
Search engines love content. They index all your html text, searching for keywords and phrases within the back end of your pages. If you are lucky enough they may even show your listing one day! We have many questions regarding search engines and listings. Some of the most popular questions relate to "where is my listing when I do a search on a popular search engine?" and "my listing isn't showing up when I type in my website name".
The answer to these questions vary, depending on which search engine you are referring to. What we can say is that it is a fact that all search engines make their income from selling advertising (the listings which are in fact paid for adverts). It is also a fact that search engines collect website data in their own specific way, then afterwards, they decide what to do with that data (which would include your website data as well). The data they collect is of course what makes up their "engine" and only they can decide when and how they will display that data on their "public search engine".
Typically, search engines can take up to around eight weeks to scan and collect data from any specific website, that is eight weeks after the website gets published live onto the internet AND after it is submitted to the specific search engine in question. We submit our clients websites to all the major search engines for free as part of our service.
You will also need to consider the fact that search engines have rules (which are ever changing) to categorise the content they collect. One of the major categorising rules for search engines is called "link popularity.
What is link popularity?
Link popularity is a measure of the number of sites which link to your site. Search engines, following the lead set by Google, use the number of incoming links to your site to rate how popular your site is. As a general rule, the more links you have, the higher your ranking in the search engine results. However, the quality of these links is also important, so a link from a site which is also well linked will count for more than a link from a site that isn't. And finally, the subject matter or theme of the linking site is also increasingly important. So a single link from a popular site in your subject area (known as an 'authority') is worth many links from unrelated sites.
Why does my site show no links in some engines?
There are a number of reasons why you may not see any links in a particular engine. Firstly, your site must be included in the search engine's index for any links to register. Next, the links to your site must be indexed by the search engine spiders. Also, If you have gained a link from a site since the last search engine update, it will not show up in the listings - you will have to wait for the next indexing cycle.
Why does my site show different link numbers for www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com?
Some search engines, such as Yahoo, differentiate between links to individual URLs. So you will get different results for different domain names, even if they both point to the same site. You will also get different values for different pages within the site. Generally, most sites will link to your home page or the root of the site. However, they may also link to useful internal pages.
How come Google reports less links than the other search engines?
Google used to only show sites of Page Rank 4 and above (Page Rank is Google's measure of page importance, an approximation of which can be viewed by using the Google Toolbar), whereas other engines report all of your backwards links. Recently, Google changed their backwards link look-up to only show you a random sample of the sites contributing to your link popularity.
These are the ways we can ensure search engines pick out your site for potential clients:
Keyword Research
Understanding what key phrases your customers are searching for is an essential part of a search engine positioning campaign. We help you find which words they use and how best to optimise pages on your site.
Site Content Optimisation
The actual site optimisation involves a variety of factors such as text content, image content, site structure, navigation, page rank, meta tags and alt tags etc. On the internet, text content was king however this is now changing as search engine systems evolve.
Link exchange questions
Reciprocal links will help improve the popularity of your website, but they are far less effective than one way back links, i.e. links from another site where you don't have to link back to them. These "One Way" back links will give your site a far greater boost in the search engine results and bring you more traffic, providing of course that you have chosen good (relevant) keywords for your links. There are many ways of getting these powerful one way back links, but most you will have no control over the anchor text used (i.e. keywords) in the link, which means their "power" is unfocused and therefore of less use to you in achieving the targeted keyword results you are looking for. For example, submitting your site to website directories can be a very effective way of picking up some high quality one way links from high PR sites, but you will seldom be able to choose the keywords/anchor text used for the link, often ending up with the site name as the link. This is not a waste of time, as the Pagerank passed to your site will, with the correct internal linking structure, be passed on to your sites internal pages, helping them to rank better for their targeted keywords.
